These times call for courageous voices that “Terror will continue until Islam is reformed” & “Islam must undergo painful theological scholarship” – Tola Adenle

These times call for a departure from the default mode of dealing with terrorism by Islamic extremists: near-denying of the role played by Islamic teachings and practices that have led to people resorting to violence to right “injustices” against Christians in the Western world as well as in places far removed from the births of these two great faiths.

Commerce and defence continue to drive the narrative of how to label these heinous, barbaric acts of inhumanity in the Western world as leaders of those countries shy away from calling for reforms that are the only way to stem these wanton killings and mayhem-spreading.

The spread of nationalism in these countries has at its roots citizens’ cries for help to their leaders to defend them.

A person who willingly migrates to a Christian country should not get there and start clamoring for Islami Sharia because, after all, no churches are allowed in Saudi Arabia and some Muslim countries. I’ve read a Christian is not even allowed to carry his/her Holy Bible into Saudi. Yet, a Muslim parent, I also read some years back, took legal action in Rome to protest Christian signs on the wrought-iron gate of his daughter’s school.

Until the Islamic world – institutions, leaders and adherents are willing to face up to the fact that a question they’ve avoided asking themselves is: what can we do on our part beyond commiserating and condemning Islamic extremism each time young the faith’s younger people spread terrorism around the world?

Without taking responsibility for actions common only to the faith, especially to doctrine preached by a sect, the whole Islamic Faith will continue to stand accused of breeding terrorists, and there will be no end to the scourge.

And without Western World government heads ready to shake what seems a morbid fear of facing the countries that promote terrorism – Saudi, and others – through funding, wink-winks/looking away from terrorism but condemning it as long as it’s not in their countries – terrorism will not end.

In today’s Times of London, Melanie Phillips’s essay hits the nail right on the head while I’ve pulled an old contribution to this blog up along the same line of thought by Ms. Phillips by Abdsalam Ajetunmobi, a lawyer by profession but a sound scholar who is well-versed in both Islamic (his faith) and Christian doctrine.

Excerpts from both essays are below.

Terror will continue until Islam is reformed

By Melanie Phillips/The Times of London

The ancient faith that inspired the London Bridge kilings must face up to its responsibilities

EXCERPTS

… political, aggressive, jihadist Islam, constrained for so long by both the Ottoman empire and western colonialism, is now dominant once again in the Muslim world. Which is why in 2015 Egypt’s President Sisi remarkably told the imams of Al-Azhar university in Cairo — the epicentre of Islamic doctrinal edicts — that Islam’s corpus of sacred texts was “antagonising the entire world”, that it was “impossible” for 1.6 billion Muslims to “want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants”, and so Islam had to have a “religious revolution”.

We should be promoting and defending such Muslim reformers in the desperate hope that they succeed. Instead we knock the ground from under their feet by saying Islamist attacks have nothing to do with Islam. Until and unless Islam is reformed, we need to treat its practices on a scale ranging from extreme caution to outlawing some of them altogether.

We must require Muslims to take responsibility for the actions of all in their community. An ICM poll of British Muslims two years ago found that nearly a quarter wanted Sharia to replace British law in areas with large Muslim populations.

Four per cent — equivalent to more than 100,000 British Muslims — said they were sympathetic to suicide bombers fighting “injustice”.

In other words, we must see jihadist Islam as at the extreme end of a continuum of beliefs which are themselves incompatible with British society.

So we shouldn’t just be stopping people coming back to Britain from Syria or Libya, or detaining terrorist suspects through control orders. We should also be closing down radical mosques, deporting those born in other countries who are involved in extremism, stopping foreign funding for Muslim institutions and banning the Muslim Brotherhood.

We should also outlaw Sharia courts because, since Sharia does not accept the superior authority of secular legislation, it inescapably undermines the core British value of one law for all.

Amidst the ongoing shrill cries of boko haram terrorism in Nigeria, Muslims need to draw a lesson I think from the measured and targeted Punch reported reactions of Christians to Mallam Nasir el-Rufai’s comical allusion to Jesus and Mary Magdalene on Twitter. Whereas if it were to be the other way round, we would by now be faced with Muslim youths, individuals or organisations promising to foment, justify or glorify terrorist violence in furtherance of their defence of Prophet Muhammad and any of his wives.

For a self-described “religion of peace,” it is hard to understand the murders by some Muslims of, for instance, the US ambassador Chris Stevens and three Americans over an amateurish online video about Prophet Muhammad, or the attempted murder of a Danish cartoonist who in 2005 had depicted the prophet with a bomb in his turban. How can a Pakistani Muslim college teacher be imprisoned and threatened with execution for speculating that Prophet Muhammad’s parents weren’t Muslims? In September last year, Iran’s Akbar Javanfekr, Ahmadinejad adviser, who is also the head of the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), was jailed for writing that the practice of women wearing the chador, Iran’s head-to-toe black veil, was not originally an Iranian practice, but an import. This was considered offensive by hardline Iranian clerics.

As someone with in-depth knowledge of both Islam and Christianity, I know for sure that the two religions claimed a lot of lives in their early years. But while Christianity later undertook theological postulations and presumptions – ever before making entry into our shore – in order to become tolerant of irreverent opinions, it appears Islam is yet to undergo such endeavours. Yet undergo, Islam must undergo painful theological scholarship. The world today can no longer tolerate blind fanaticism and reactionary religious thinking which knows bounds neither of humanity nor of spiritualism.

On the attitude of Islam’s religious leaders, I must say that most Muslim opinion-makers like to deny the existence of an objective fact that the whole superstructure of Islam needs to be overhauled to adapt it to the social structures of life in the 21st century. They would rather think that the fact can be made to simply disappear.

Take for instance, the view of Sajid Javid, the British secretary of state for communities and local government, in the same The Times (London) newspaper yesterday: “After any terrorist attack a lot of well-meaning people line up to say it has nothing to do with Islam. That the perpetrators are not true Muslims.” Mr Javid thus denies that Islamist terrorism could have much to do with Islam, thereby making a fact of the linkage between Islamic scriptures and violent extremism disappear, right before his eyes.

Yet as Sheikh Mohammad Tawhidi, quoted in The Times newspaper report which you referred, has rightly said, Islamic “scriptures are exactly what is pushing these people to behead the infidel. Our books teach the beheading of people.” Therefore, there is a big problem within Islam. Hence, there can be no comprehensive solution to Islamist terrorism until Islamic theology is completely reformed.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts on a subject that is not going to go away until terrorism is overcome, and that looks like an uphill task.

I must have skimmed through not less-than a hundred comments on Ms. Phillips’ essay most of which not only concurred with the two essays that drove the post but many of which doubt, rightly, that nothing about “enough is enough” is going to be done because the West is ruled by greedy selfish rulers whose actions – not their words, are dictated on perpetuating themselves in office for political and economic power.

Most politicians in these countries are probably mere shades better than the kleptomaniac robbers they often disparage in Nigeria and such countries. The self-interest leads to cowardice which forces them to shy away from criticizing Saudi and other countries that harbor financiers of terrorism.

“Terror will continue until Islam is reformed” and until structural changes take place after the Faith “undergoes painful theological scholarship”.